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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24421831">I too believe (it's not dead and gone)</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl'>TolkienGirl</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [245]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Child Neglect, Gen, Goodley the Overseer, Maeglin leaving Angband and going ... To a new bad life, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Survivor Guilt, Unreliable Narrator, title from BANNERS</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-06-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 06:49:41</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,151</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24421831</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Cowardice had changed his body as well as whatever spirit still lives inside it. (Maeglin is taken farther west.)</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Maeglin | Lómion &amp; Maedhros | Maitimo, Maeglin | Lómion &amp; Melkor | Morgoth Bauglir, Maeglin | Lómion &amp; Original Male Character(s)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [245]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1300685</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>18</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Maeglin wakes shivering.</p><p>It is their fifth day on the road north, or it would be, if they were following a known route. They keep to gnarled forests, where wind and fire have laid waste the giant pines and the undergrowth alike. They wade through rivers that leave Maeglin damp to his hips. At night, his teeth chatter in the brisk air. The fires Goodley builds are never large enough to warm them.</p><p>Five days ago, he thought that the climb down the Mountain would break him, though he wore his stoutest boots and his only coat and carried very little in the pack upon his back. Winter chill made the steep decline seems steeper. This was how he knew that cowardice had changed his body as well as whatever spirit still lives inside it. Before he was an errand-boy for death and judgment, he was scrawny yet strong. He could wield the forge hammers, lift makeshift coal scuttles, hike up and down the rough ground.</p><p>Now? Now he breathes unevenly, heaving lungfuls of thin, snow-pricked air. His legs are afire, his shoulders feel fitted together wrong at the joints.</p><p>Goodley does not speak to him, save to announce their stops and starts.</p><p>Maeglin hates and fears him. The man seems hard and cruel, as are most of the men he knows or has known. Was not Murphy the same? Was not—is not Mairon?</p><p>Goodley is more like Mairon. That animal coldness behind his eyes. The pressure of his locked jaw. Were it not for Bauglir’s orders, Maeglin thinks he would be already dead, cast down a rock-pitted cliff, for animals to break their fasts upon.</p><p>At the very least, Goodley would strike him, if he could.</p><p>But Bauglir was clear in his instructions: the sealed letter, the promise of future work under Ancalagon, who must be a woman of some influence in the north. Maeglin prefers women to men; for the happiest years of his life, he only saw men from afar.</p><p>He hopes he will prefer Ancalagon to Bauglir, but he can stake no confidence on <em>that</em> hope.</p><p><em>I nearly dashed your skull against the rock-road when you told me what he’d done</em>, Bauglir said when they parted. That was after he had spoken of what saved Maeglin’s pitiful life; of what made Maeglin so precious a gift.</p><p><em>Is that why?</em> Maeglin dares not ask, not even to his nightmares. <em>Is that why you chose me and not the dashed skull? Because I can make things with my hands?</em></p><p>He fears that it is more than that; that it is some twisted game, some twisted justice.</p><p>(Russandol made things with his hands also.)</p><p>In his nightmares, after all, he has his answer. Bauglir appears, so gloating and so great as to fill the vast space and silence of night.</p><p><em>I let you live because you loved the one you ruined</em>, he roars, and Maeglin must put his dream-hands over his dream-ears, hollow with a grief that sobs louder, even, than the grief that wept for his mother.</p><p>In the blank daylight, he knows that Bauglir never spared a thought for Maeglin’s love, either for himself or his poor mother or for Russandol. After giving Maeglin word of Russandol’s damning crime, what cause had Bauglir to worry? That crime linked the chain together, and the chain was drawn tight.</p><p>If it was broken in secret—</p><p><em>You should have known</em>, Maeglin thinks, gasping over a stone lodged in his knee where he stumbled, <em>you should have known all the ways you were given a traitor.</em></p><p>“Get up,” says Goodley, and Maeglin gets up.</p><p>Bauglir did not kill him. Bauglir thought him useful. He must accept the terrible simplicity of his worth, and add to it neither more nor less.</p><p>(He must also find a way to run.)</p><p>Goodley dislikes crossing open land, where tall grasses are wearily flattened and shrubs huddle together like herd-animals seeking warmth. Long ago, Maeglin lived in the upper part of a tavern, with a back window which faced a neighboring farm. There were sheep there. They looked like clouds come to earth.</p><p>They will find no sheep here; only wolves. Maeglin understands that there are dangerous enemies outside the Mountain’s sprawling fortress. He has known that for some time, for Russandol represented them. And he, a young slave with gruesome, recent scarring and a badly broken leg, had done the work of a hundred soldiers.</p><p>(Is it love, that Maeglin so readily thinks of him with admiration?)</p><p>(Maeglin, who fetched the dreadful glove?)</p><p>He never mentions Russandol to Goodley. Murphy knew Russandol, and abused him whenever he had the opportunity, yet Maeglin was never afraid of Murphy.</p><p>Nor was he alone with him, without any choice in the matter.</p><p>When they make their camp, and Goodley kills a rabbit, Maeglin reaches into the pocket of his coat and runs a finger along the edge of the letter.</p><p>
  <em>A precious gift.</em>
</p><p>He is too hungry to mourn for the wide-eyed little creature whose skin now lies in a heap of blood and fur on the ground at their feet. He picks the meat off the bones, waiting for Goodley to speak or strike or shoot, and is instead rewarded with silence and the foul scent of chewing tobacco.</p><p>The women he used to know cared for him much in the way Russandol did; careful never to assert a claim to him. Tender in ways he did not always see or understand, until they were gone from his world.</p><p>Russandol—Russandol escaped. That device could not hold him. A beating enough to break bones could not destroy him.</p><p>Maeglin knows, curled for sleep on the bruising earth, that Russandol had help. He knows that there are other people in the world who love and are loved in return. Those people do not belong to Maeglin, nor he to them. He is on a long road, fresh-trodden, that leads only to a bargain for things greater and sharper than his life.</p><p>
  
</p><p>They are going to kill him. Unlike Russandol, he expects to die when they do.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>They reach San Francisco on the sixth afternoon. If Maeglin knew much of the world, he would understand that unattainable Mithrim is farther from Diablo’s peak than the greatest city of the West.<em> His</em> journey, had it been made in an expedient fashion, would have ended at the bay in two brisk days; three in bad weather.</p><p>Maeglin knows little of the world. Moreover, he aches: blinded by fear for half his waking moments; terribly observant of all that is minute and haunting, for the rest.</p><p>Goodley cannot kick out the smoldering coals with his heavy boots, or kill a rabbit, without Maeglin’s silent, trembling notice. Maeglin is the rabbit; the gopher; the quail. Goodley says,</p><p>“Earn your keep, you little bugger,” and Maeglin bloodies his fingers with a poor attempt at plucking. He tears the quail’s thin, pliant skin. He feels as if that tear is still a wound to a living body; a body that can hurt.</p><p>His teeth chatter.</p><p>When he sees the city at last, a mirage of house-studded hills under a shifting cap of smoke and sun, he realizes that his troubles are renewed, and more fearsome than ever.</p><p>For six days with Goodley, he was safe. He did not trust to this soon enough, but since Goodley did not kill him on the first day, he could have had no real intention of killing him on the third. The length and secrecy of their road were testaments to the man’s caution. Maeglin knows only half of what he should, but he understands enough to regret having wasted so much of his half-freedom on fear.</p><p>He blinks back tears, regretting it. He is filthy and weary and he dreams, each night, of Russandol.</p><p>(Russandol would be—he thinks that Russandol would be kind, still, to a boy who had done this dreadful thing. Maybe there are two Russandols; the one in his dreams and the one in Bauglir’s room. Can one forgive the other’s murderers?)</p><p>(Which one survived?)</p><p>The city of San Francisco is full of good and wicked people, as all cities are, and its heart is split chiefly according to its visitors’ ambitions. Goodley and Maeglin cross the glittering bay in a boat, but there is so—much—water—on the other side of the pincered land, so much water that Maeglin, in his sheltered, pincered life, has never dreamed of—</p><p>Goodley pays the boatman with some of his coins. The boatman asks no questions. Does he receive more coins, for that?</p><p>To cross, they must navigate around a graveyard of sorts. Hulls and masts rise like the proud bones of ancient whales. Maeglin saw an engraving of a whale, once, on a smooth white tooth larger than his (littler) hand. That was in the old life, up and away from the rough voices and tramping feet.</p><p><em>Oh, yes, love,</em> Libby said. Libby called herself a “Yank” and kept many trinkets from her men. She braided Maeglin a little doll of silk scraps, <em>for they’re always leaving me ribbons and what am I to do with them?</em></p><p>Libby’s father had drawn that whale with the sharp end of a little tool. She said it was called <em>scrimshaw</em>.</p><p>Maeglin blinks and holds fast to the side of the boat. He has never sailed before; he feels rather strange and sick.</p><p>All because of the graveyard!</p><p>“What’s all this, then?” Goodley asks, after they have passed at least a dozen, bobbing slowly and ponderously with the shallow-valleyed waves. The boatman is surprised to be spoken to. He is a man with a dull red face to speak his business, and a dull red cap to keep his ears warm on the water.</p><p>“Rushers,” he says. “They leave ‘em here, eager for the gold. Crew off in one go, mostly. For some, it’s been years…”</p><p>Goodley grunts instead of answering. The dead ships do not interest him further. They have no use to him.</p><p>Maeglin still hates him, still hates the way his small eyes are flat and cold to their very depths, hates how his feet march tirelessly onward.</p><p>They disembark. Goodley does not know exactly where he is going; he mutters oaths beneath his breath, and is forced to ask for directions, more than once, to “Arthur, fishmonger.” Parts of the city are grand and fashionable—at least, they appear so to Maeglin. The shopfronts, the fancy-dress, the horse-drawn carriages. There are sights and sounds and smells aplenty. There are more people—more kinds of people, with different tints of skin and spoken words—than Maeglin has ever known.</p><p>Goodley says rude things about them, sneering. He is surer of himself, now, with the fishmonger close at hand. As his last inquiries proved fruitful, he speaks more insults, but less outright curses.</p><p><em>Ancalagon</em>, Maeglin thinks. She will not sell fish, surely. <em>Ancalagon, Ancalagon</em>. But it does not even sound like a name.</p><p>The ribbon doll that Libby made for him is long-lost. When the time came for him to leave behind the old life, he did not pass into new childhood.</p><p>Still, he loved. He thinks that he <em>did</em> know how to love, and that he tried his very best to turn the skill outwards, like an old coat made fresh.</p><p>It is only that they had so little time together, he and his mother.</p><p>“Here,” Goodley says. They hurry past a fish-cart, past whomever Arthur may be, hawking silver wares on a wide arc of tables. The fish waft a sharp, full scent through the cool air.</p><p>There is a narrow alley, and a door twice-chained.</p><p>Goodley knocks. A plate slides aside.</p><p>“Arise in might,” Goodley says.</p><p>Bolts are sheathed, invisible, and then a hand slips out to unlock the chains. This is done nimbly, which means it is done often.</p><p>Maeglin is almost curious about the doorkeeper, but he has no time to see the man or ask him questions. Inside there are cigar-smoke stairs scarcely wide enough for Goodley, and at the top of that stairs is another door.</p><p>Goodley stops. He looks almost reluctant to enter, but he does not look on Maeglin with any kindness.</p><p>“Ugly as sin, you are,” he says. “No time to wash that face! Ah, well. Don’t shame me. It’ll be worse if you do, with this lot. I’m the backer of your reputation, y’hear?”</p><p>Then he opens the door, and thrusts Maeglin through it first.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The room Maeglin enters is nothing like the stairway, except that here, too, is a thick scent of smoke.</p><p><em>Cigar </em>smoke, to be precise. He has known it all his young life. He sees the thick, paper-swaddled glowworm pinched between the blunt fingers of a man whose eyes, meeting his, are colder even than Goodley’s.</p><p>The man’s hat is on his knee. A silver hatband winking round its crown draws Maeglin’s notice, but in truth, he would have looked anywhere to escape that piercing gaze. Then the man laughs.</p><p>“God damn me, if it ain’t Goodley!”</p><p>“Hullo, sir,” Goodley mutters.</p><p><em>Sir</em> lifts one corner of his cruel mouth. “You got out, then.”</p><p>“Same as you.”</p><p>“No—not quite the same. You’re on <em>his </em>errand. And the brat is his attempt at a gift.”</p><p>“This is Maeglin,” Goodley says stiffly.</p><p>Maeglin is surprised, somehow, that Goodley recalls his name.</p><p>“Maeglin,” the man repeats, savoring. “Damn me. I can see it. Scrawny bit of madness, aren’t you? You must be, considering.”</p><p>“I’ll thank ye, Cosomoco, to tread on your own shoe-leather.” Here is a woman’s voice at last. Maeglin expected to see a woman upon entering, but the cold-eyed man held him as fast as a dog’s jaws. <em>She</em> has an Irish brogue, plummy and vulgar, and she is the one seated on the far side of the room, behind a massive desk that is at least as large as Bauglir’s. Maeglin sees at last the heavy velvet curtains, the canary cage, the woman’s square-cut jowls and heavy hands spread out before her.</p><p>Anne McCalagon (it could not be anyone else) is almost <em>old</em>.</p><p>“Have at him,” Cosomoco answers. “Have at Bauglir’s gift, ma’am. There’s not enough meat on those bones to pass round, I reckon.”</p><p>“Let me look,” she says. She rises, carrying a cane—a black stick as wide as a thigh-bone. Maeglin imagines its crack across his back, and all but winces. Is this how Russandol spent all his waking moments? Envisioning whatever pain was to follow its vicious brethren?</p><p>(Russandol had an old life. Because he was kind, it must have been a kind life. Perhaps the people who loved him then, and whoever saved him later, were the same.)</p><p>Maeglin stands very still as the she-dragon approaches, circling him with shrewd interest. She is a tall, massive woman, but she is dwarfed in shoulder-width by the man Cosomoco, who resembles a bull poised either to paw or charge.</p><p>“What can you do, Maeglin?” Anne McCalagon demands. “I hear your master’s forge was burned to ash by a rebel. Are you the only thing left?”</p><p>He could die here. Goodley did not kill him, but this woman will, and Cosomoco will, if he is not useful. It was always so with Bauglir.</p><p>“Here is a letter for you,” he says, hoping his voice does not sound as tremulous in their ears as it does in his own. He digs for the sacred missive. “Master Bauglir bade me give it directly. It—it shall explain me.”</p><p>Bauglir told him not to speak for himself.</p><p>
  <em>For you have not the wits, my boy. You haven’t the tongue. Be grateful for that—a clever tongue is soon plucked.</em>
</p><p><em>She</em> returns to her desk, the letter in hand, and she reads it.</p><p>Cosomoco, however, is not content to be silent. He tilts his head, looking at Goodley, and Maeglin, stealing a glance at his chaperone himself, realizes for the first time that Goodley is afraid.</p><p>Cosomoco demands, “He paying you any better than I did?”</p><p>“No.”</p><p>“He’s a tight-fisted scoundrel. Gave me a pretty penny, I’ll own—but it weren’t worth it in the end. How piss-mad was he, losing the redhead?”</p><p>Goodley shifts from one foot to the other. “You didn’t hear, then. The hunter brought him back.”</p><p>“Lord above.” His eyes aren’t cold now. They flare, and his nostrils flare. Maeglin can feel the dark well of his pleasure rising, rising. This man knows Russandol then, and hates him.</p><p>They hate him so very much, and for what?</p><p>Even Maeglin, from whom Russandol stole everything, cannot hate him.</p><p>“He’s <em>dead</em>, then,” Cosomoco says. “They finally brought the bitch to heel.”</p><p>Goodley shakes his head. Scrubs a hand over his forehead, as if he sweats. Despite the sweat, it is not a warm room. Maeglin wonders if the canary can shiver; if it can ever find comfort or peace.</p><p>“Naw,” Goodley admits. “He run off again. Damned if I know how. He was a right pulp, I heard, from those that saw it. They beat him to a right pulp.”</p><p>Cosomoco is silent. He blows out a long breath, nearly a whistle. “Jesus,” he says, gone cold again. “Bauglir really is that boy’s god, in’t he? He’ll let him play at life until they both go down to the pit.” He kicks his chair back, stands. Strides past Maeglin, until he’s planted beside Anne McCalagon’s desk. “Well? He say as much in the letter?”</p><p>“You’ve sure blathered on a fair bit while I read,” she says, “But so did Bauglir. The long and short is, this Maeglin lad…Maeglin, there you are. Can you make these marvellous guns?”</p><p>Russandol’s hands next to his. Russandol’s words about barrels and chambers, Russandol’s leg dragging in the dust. To be Russandol was to suffer. To be Maeglin is to betray.</p><p>“I can,” Maeglin whispers. And then, terrified that they will be angry for his whisper, he repeats, louder, “I can.”</p><p>“Bless the boy,” Anne McCalagon drawls, with no hint of benediction in her tone. “Well then, Cosomoco. I’ve plans for you—you know ‘em—and if this Goodley lad wants a better-lined pocket and Lord, a shorter tongue to lash him, he need only stay close. We’ll send word back to Bauglir…another way.”</p><p>Goodley is done shifting from foot to foot. “Thank you, ma’am,” he says, very politely. “I’d like that.”</p><p>Maeglin and the canary are the only two creatures in the room who are given no choice but the swiftness of their deaths. Maeglin wants to be so small and so weak that no one wants him, that no one notices him—that was the old life, and it was good.</p><p>(But Russandol was <em>strong</em>—)</p><p>“Glaurung will be here at any moment,” Anne McCalagon says, “And we shall give the boy to him.”</p>
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